Skin Deep

Exhibit 1:

A Chinese cosmetics company is using skin harvested from the corpses of executed convicts to develop beauty products for sale in Europe, an investigation by the Guardian has discovered. Agents for the firm have told would-be customers it is developing collagen for lip and wrinkle treatments from skin taken from prisoners after they have been shot.

Exhibit 2:

“Tyler was making real bucks. Nordstrom’s called and left an order for two hundred bars of Tyler’s brown sugar facial soap before Christmas. At twenty bucks a bar, suggested retail price, we had money to go out on Saturday night.”

I want you to hit me as hard as you can.

This entry was written by mhoye, posted on September 14, 2005 at 10:12 am, filed under digital. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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2 Comments

The first draft of this entry had that quote from the movie in it. This one’s from the book. I changed it, because the people whose asses are being sold are not vain, obese Westerners. They are, in some part, political dissenters. Selling vain, fat westerners soap made from their own fat has a certain symbolic resonance to it, a sense of karmic justice. Selling vain, fat westerners a soap made from the dead bodies of an oppressed third world people, not so much.

This is a process that turns the corpses of political prisoners into cosmetics whose sales will funds the oppressors; it is the biodiesel of Orwellian thuggery. It is not, in any stretch of the imagination, “just”.